Katawa Shoujo is a bishoujo-style visual novel set in the fictional Yamaku High School for disabled children, located somewhere in modern Japan. Hisao Nakai, a normal boy living a normal life, has his life turned upside down when a congenital heart defect forces him to move to a new school after a long hospitalization. Despite his difficulties, Hisao is able to find friends—and perhaps love, if he plays his cards right. There are five main paths corresponding to the 5 main female characters, each path following the storyline pertaining to that character.
The story is told through the perspective of the main character, using a first person narrative. This game uses a traditional text and sprite-based visual novel model with an ADV text box.
Katawa Shoujo is under development by an international team of amateur developers, and will be released free of charge under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License.

After 5 years of development to the day, Katawa Shoujo is now complete.

Katawa Shoujo download links:Torrent:Windows|Mac OS X| Linux: see belowDDL: Windows | Mac OS X | Linux x86Do not download this content if you are not 18 years old or over.Direct download links coming back soon.

ATTENTION: The Linux version has a faulty and potentially dangerous launcher script. Until the full download can be replaced, please download Dl.katawa-shoujo.com and replace the one in the full download (Torrent here) with it.

The Internet, January 4th 2012 - Four Leaf Studios is proud to present the full release of Katawa Shoujo, free of charge. It's been five long years until this day, with a multinational group of twenty-one developers working on art, music, writing, programming, and direction, to say nothing of the innumerable contributors to the project both past and present, but it's finally here.

Katawa Shoujo is a visual novel set in the fictional Yamaku High School for disabled children, located in modern Japan. Hisao Nakai, a normal boy living a normal life, has his life turned upside down when a congenital heart defect forces him to move to a new school after a long hospitalization. Despite his difficulties, Hisao is able to find friends — and perhaps love, if he plays his cards right. There are five main paths corresponding to the 5 main female characters, each path following the storyline pertaining to that character. The story is told through the perspective of the main character, using a first person narrative. The game uses a traditional text and sprite-based visual novel model with an ADV text box.

The story of Katawa Shoujo is a long one, spanning over a decade. In December of the year 2000, the doujin Schuppen Harnische was released by the artist RAITA of circle Zettai Shoujo. One of the pages in the extras section of the doujin contained a sketch imagining a game about disabilities set in a Japanese high school. If not for later events, that may well have been the end of it. With the sticky in 4chan's anime board in January of 2007, though, interest was suddenly sparked in the idea within, and the idea of creating this game came about. After months of brainstorming, but little progress, a core development team by the name of Four Leaf Studios was formed in April of the same year. With this, Katawa Shoujo was set on the path to its final creation.

Four Leaf Studios is a volunteer group of twenty-one developers from around the world, having come together for the sole purpose of developing Katawa Shoujo. Hailing from many different countries, backgrounds, and professions, Four Leaf Studios became committed to working towards Katawa Shoujo as an entirely free game, with no money involved in the project.

With that, the story of Four Leaf Studios is finished. As a single entity, we will not be producing another game. But even though our story has ended, you will now be able to experience a new story; the story that Four Leaf Studios existed to create.

Usually nothing good crawls out of the God-forbidden caverns of 4chan, but this may be the only exception. I'm about 40 minutes into the game, and the artwork looks great. The only thing that bothers me is the 'Adult Content' option. It's not as though I am worried about getting caught viewing the explicit intention graphic novels can present; it's just that...if 4chan adds this option, the content must be terrifying for any eyes.

I might take a look, if I have the time. I'm a 4chan lurker, after all. Just a thought, not to sound paranoid: this shows up on Mod Database. Now if it has optional scenes of sexy fun times, as I'm assuming, would that cause problems? ModdB has rules against pornography.

I just wanted to throw it out there that this is one of the first visual novels that I've played, and the one that I enjoy the most thus far. I really enjoy that the game handles the issue of handicapped people very maturely, especially for the over-sexualized genre that is visual novels.

I played through it three times (four if you count skipping, and that doesn't even touch the times I had to start again / alternative endings), and it's rather enjoyable. I'm not very well acquainted with the genre, but if I were to offer a criticism, I'd say it's too wordy / long-winded at places, and probably could do with a few more choices presented to the player, even if they don't end up changing anything significant (there were a few like that and I was very happy just to see small changes in the dialogue).